Ranking

I was abducted as a child, but because I had fair skin and a pretty face,

I was carefully trained into a temptress made to ensnare wealthy young masters.

That night, in the most extravagant luxury suite in Macau,

Zhao Rongzheng lay there, languid and sated, his gaze falling on me as I wept like a flower in the rain.

“Stop crying. I’ll pay off your brother’s debt for him. From now on, you stay with me.”

I took the money, coaxed him with sweet words, and then vanished without a trace.

Five years later, news that the Seventh Young Master of the Zhao Family was divorcing his wife to marry a widow shook all of Hong Kong.

Zhao Rongzheng, now the man in power over the Zhao Family, personally stepped forward to handle this sordid scandal.

Seated high above me, he looked down at my meek, submissive, pitifully vulnerable appearance.

“What is it? Does every man in the Zhao Family have to fall into your hands at least once?”

Lin Wanrou was twenty-four this year, an old maiden who still had not married.

Madam Lin’s standards for a son-in-law had fallen from imperial kin to any promising young talent with ambition.

She refused to believe that, with the Grand General’s influence, she could not raise up one dragon among men as her son-in-law.

Lin Wanrou did not want to marry. She would rather stay at home for the rest of her life.

I fell into a sewer while I was out buying groceries and was already unconscious by the time I was rescued.

But unexpectedly, while I was unconscious, a gas explosion occurred at home, killing my husband instantly.

Sobbing hysterically, I stumbled home as fast as I could.

The neighbors all remarked on how deeply my husband and I must have loved each other.

Only I knew I was merely anxious to see the fruits of my labor.

After all, I couldn’t put my mind at ease until I’d seen it with my own eyes…

The enemy army pressed against the border. To humiliate our dynasty, the Xiqing Tribe specifically demanded that the Empress be sent for a political marriage.

In the court, the Emperor resolutely defied the majority opinion and was determined to protect me.

I pondered all night. This was the land my beloved had sworn to defend to the death. This was my home, my roots. I could not run away.

Outside the Capital gate, I questioned him:

“Three years ago, when the enemy army was outside Yuezhou City, didn’t Pei Yu send you six urgent requests for reinforcements?”

“Xiao Jince, why didn’t you send troops?”

Fu Shiyu, the crown prince of Beijing’s elite circles, was famously untouchable.

I worked as his chief interpreter for three years.

He still never managed to remember my full name.

Until the day I “ran into” him at the gallery he often visited, my fingertip brushing over his Adam’s apple.

“CEO Fu, your tie is crooked.”

He pinned me against the floor-to-ceiling window and bit my earlobe.

“Who are you calling CEO Fu?

“Say that again. I dare you.”

The school bully tormented me at school, then followed me home and, right in front of me, slammed Ah Huang, the puppy who had grown up by my side, to death.

But the bully didn’t know I was the Daughter of the Underworld King.

Seizing souls was an ability I had been born with.

The next day, the bully acted completely out of character at school. One by one, he beat up everyone who had ever picked on me.

Then he announced in front of everyone that from now on, he would protect me forever.

When no one was around, I reached up and patted his head. “Good boy, Ah Huang. This body is pretty useful, isn’t it?”

I’m a fanfic writer with nearly a million followers on Big-Eyed Guy.

My OTP? A wildly popular young actress and a famous up-and-coming director.

Soon, self-media accounts across the entire internet would be required to register under their real names, and verified influencers with over a million followers would be the first batch to go public.

The moment I got wind of it, I deleted my account and ran.

Because I was that wildly popular young actress.

But netizens loved drama far too much to let it go. They started posting gossip threads across every major social media platform: Girl, who the hell are you?

I had lived with the Shen family for eighteen years when they suddenly told me I was a fake heiress.

The real heiress wept and begged my adoptive parents to throw me out because the mere sight of me upset her.

My biological mother grabbed my hand and ran, terrified that my adoptive parents might try to stop us.

After all, we both knew the apocalypse was coming.

My mother had farmland, a house, a little grocery store, and even a storage dimension in the countryside—not a pile of useless numbers in a bank account.

After ten years of training for the wrong kind of ‘dance,’ the formidable Li Rourou must win an emperor’s favor or die.

Her strength, appetite, and spectacular misunderstandings turn every elegant harem scheme into chaos.

While the emperor plays rival clans against one another, Rourou blunders through assassination attempts, poisoned soup, princely feuds, and a brewing coup.

When imperial gratitude proves dangerously short-lived, she discovers that becoming the harem’s number one woman may require replacing the man at its center.

Of the five children in my family, four are queer-and they have paired off with each other.

Convinced that I am the last hope of both bloodlines, my father rejoices when he learns that I have a boyfriend.

Then my boyfriend messages me, “The new collar is here, Mommy-put it on me.”

I quietly locked my phone.

Apparently, he is even less fit to bring home.

I’m the number one antique appraisal streamer on the entire internet.

Because I’m good at what I do, have a terrible temper, and always look like I rolled out of a dumpster, netizens jokingly call me “Mei Chaofeng.”

It’s perfectly normal for viewers who join my livestream to get roasted by me.

“Sister Chao, how do I turn on my camera?”

“Figure it out yourself. You’ve got two eggs hanging under your eyebrows, but all they do is blink instead of see.”

“Sister Chao, what do I do if I can’t switch screens?”

“You’re a living, breathing person. Don’t tell me you’re going to let a piss break kill you. Just go be stupid somewhere else.”

“Sister Chao, does this look authentic?”

“Calling that garbage would be an insult to waste sorting.”

Until the person who connected with me was a pure, handsome hunk with the sweetest, softest little vibe.

His face flushed red as he held up a pile of “junk,” fumbling all over the place.

“Sister… I’m sorry… I couldn’t figure out how to flip the camera.”

And there I was, chin propped in my hand, smiling as gentle as could be.

“It’s okay. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how. I’ll teach you, okay? No rush.”

The viewers in the livestream couldn’t sit still anymore.

[Did she just change faces???]

[Double-Standard Sister!!!]

After I found out the handsome guy’s family had gone bankrupt and he’d been forced to become a male model, I verbally advised him to get out of that line of work as soon as possible.

In my heart, however, I was already calculating how to get my hands on him for a little fun.

But later, the “junk” he took out turned out to be more valuable than the last.

Among them, that emerald gemstone haunted my every thought.

The pitiful little thing transformed into a noble young master. He loomed over me, trapping me in the corner of the bed.

The outer corner of his eye, marked with a tear mole, curved slightly as his predatory gaze swept inch by inch over my skin.

At his fair throat, the emerald swayed gently.

“Give me what I want, Sister, and I’ll give you what you want.”

Le Yao wakes inside an ancient romance as the personal maid of Prince Li, a brilliant war hero whose violent obsession with Wei Qingzhi turns every workday into a fight for survival.

As she becomes the unwilling go-between in their toxic courtship, Le Yao schemes to buy freedom with fellow maid Qingping-until the story’s ordained romance demands a price she refuses to accept.

I stayed beside Xie Chen from the days when he had nothing until he became a wealthy man, only to discover his affair seven days before our wedding.

He expected me to forgive him, protect his company, and leave our marriage with nothing, but I had built his success with my own hands and knew exactly how to take my life back.

While his first love fought to become Mrs. Xie, I divorced him, sold my shares at a premium, and founded a company of my own.

By the time their so-called true love collapsed under greed, debt, and betrayal, I had already learned that the best time to call off a bad marriage is the moment you see it clearly.

When my elder sister was preparing to marry Marquis Ding’an,

she caught the eye of the Crown Prince.

Our entire family was overjoyed.

To give the marquis’s household an explanation, they pushed me out in her place on the day of the wedding.

After we were married, Marquis Ding’an despised me.

Again and again, he mocked me to my face:

“Crude and vulgar. You don’t compare to your sister in the slightest.”

“You can’t even read an account book. Astonishingly stupid.”

I felt wronged too. I smashed my rouge and powder at him and cursed,

“My sister is the Crown Princess now. If you’re so capable, go steal her back, you coward!”

And so we spent our entire lives at each other’s throats.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to when I was sixteen and not yet married.

My elder sister looked at me with smiling eyes and coaxed,

“Little sister, would you like to marry into the marquis’s household and become the Marchioness?”

The night I married Pei Guanli, I cried so hard I soaked half my bridal veil.

Not because I didn’t want to marry him, but because everyone in the capital knew that Pei Guanli was more upright and proper than the ancestral tablets in a shrine.

He oversaw ceremonial protocols at the Ministry of Rites and revised the dynasty’s statutes and rites.

If a family used the wrong ritual vessels at a wedding, he could remember it for three years.

If someone wailed one time too many at a funeral, he could submit a memorial impeaching them straight to the emperor.

As the daughter of a merchant family from Jiangnan, this was exactly the sort of man I feared most.

Before my mother sent me into the bridal sedan, she clutched my hands and cried even harder than I did.

“Ah Ning, once you reach the Pei Family, speak less, smile less, and eat less.”

I asked, “Why eat less?”

Choking back sobs, my mother said, “Noble young ladies in the capital eat as delicately as if they’re painting flowers. You eat three bowls in one sitting. You’ll give yourself away too easily.”

I paused, suddenly feeling that before this marriage had even reached the bridal chamber, I had already lost on appetite alone.

Jiang Yerao is young, beautiful, naïve, and proud. Even though she knows Ruan Pingshan is only willing to give her money and affection, not an official place by his side, she stays with him because she likes him too much. While enjoying the sweetness of being spoiled, she is also stung by the realities of class differences, marriage, and her own self-respect. Little by little, she realizes that being nothing more than a pampered canary can never truly put her at his side.

With the encouragement of her friends and the push of her career, Jiang Yerao goes from relying on Ruan Pingshan to running her own buyer’s boutique. She learns how to judge people’s intentions, protect herself, and rethink both love and independence. Meanwhile, through her transformation, Ruan Pingshan gradually lets go of his fear of marriage and family relationships and begins to face his own feelings. The two of them pull against each other, misunderstand each other, and test each other along the way, until in the end, they choose each other in a more equal and open-hearted way.

Chapter 0

Liang Ling shot to unexpected fame thanks to a fleeting “white moonlight” scene in a xianxia drama, and through it, she met Tang Chen, the calm and self-restrained heir to a wealthy family. During their five-year relationship, she thought she had finally found the stable love and family she had always wanted. Instead, time and again, Tang Chen’s practical calculations, family obligations, and views on marriage pushed her into second place.

Career scandals, breakups and reconciliations, and his belated attempts to make her stay finally made Liang Ling see the truth: this relationship had long since become a burden neither of them could afford to carry. In the end, she dragged her luggage away from Tang Chen and gave her five years of youth a proper goodbye as well.

Xu Qiangyuan has spent her life defying the deadly fate only she can see.

When her once-devoted husband returns from war protecting a pregnant widow and chooses the woman’s lies over his wife, Qiangyuan decides she will not merely end her marriage—she will replace the emperor who refuses to grant the divorce.

With the Grand Princess and the formidable Xu clan at her side, Lady Rakshasa sets out to expose a spy, crush a tyrant, and build a realm where no woman must kneel.

My elder sister and I were twins, born of the same womb.

But an eminent monk declared that I was the reincarnation of a fox demon, and that one day I would become a Wicked Concubine who bewitched the sovereign.

My family concealed my identity and sent me to Fahua Temple to cultivate a pure heart in seclusion.

In the sixteenth year of my quiet practice,

I had almost forgotten I was a demon. I only wanted to be a good person.

But then the Empress, favored above all in the six palaces, had a dream. She dreamed that one day, a woman of the Shen Clan would steal her phoenix throne.

And so my elder sister, who was soon to be married, was taken by bandits and violated again and again before dying an innocent, miserable death.

I held her body in my arms and wept until I had no tears left.

Three months later, the emperor came up the mountain to pray for blessings. The moment he saw me, he fell in love.

He asked if I was willing to follow him back to the palace.

I thought,

That title of Calamitous Demon Concubine… I suppose I ought to make it true.

The man I secretly loved was the legitimate princess’s fiancé.

I was the unfavored Seventh Princess, and the fiancé bestowed upon me was a drunken libertine who gambled, kept concubines, and maintained a mistress outside his estate.

But that was all right.

My best friend had the ultimate cheat code.

The auspicious hour had arrived. The wedding rites were complete, yet the bride remained kneeling in her blood-red wedding dress.

A gust of wind lifted her bridal veil, revealing a woman’s half-rotted head. Her lifeless eyes stared straight at me.

I tried to flee, but an icy hand clamped tightly around my wrist.

“Where are you going, my lady?” the wedding attendant asked with a smile. “It’s time for the banquet.”

Dark purple corpse spots stood out starkly on his powder-caked wrist.

So none of the guests at the wedding banquet were alive.

Myself included.

Shen Qi had secretly loved my elder sister for years.

When she and I fell into the river together, he mistook me for her and pulled me out first.

My sister was swept away and drowned.

Knowing none of this, I fell hopelessly in love with him.

I made such a scene about marrying him that he gladly agreed.

After the wedding, however, he alternated between warmth and coldness.

At times he treated me tenderly.

At others, he looked at me as if he hated me to the bone.

Once bright and willful, I withered day by day and lived in misery.

Only as I lay dying did I discover the truth…

He was kind whenever I reminded him of my sister.

He was cruel whenever he remembered that he blamed me for her death.

After I was reborn, I climbed onto the bank by myself and watched him rejoice at having my sister back.

Then I turned and walked toward the most exalted man in the realm.

Qiu Yue learned young that in troubled times, only a hard heart and a ruthless hand could keep a woman alive.

When the innocent Jiang Wanning searches an entire city and saves her from death, Qiu Yue vows to protect her for the rest of her life.

So when a scheming scholar tries to ruin Wanning’s reputation and force his way into her family, Qiu Yue quietly leads him into a dark alley.

The scholar dies, a tale about a pig demon spreads through the capital, and her trusting young mistress believes every word.

Anyone who wants to hurt Jiang Wanning should understand one thing: Qiu Yue may wear the sweet smile of a harmless maid, but she has never hesitated to kill.

After years away from the capital, I returned to find a female study attendant at my fiancé’s side.

I stormed over to demand an explanation, only to drink a cup of drugged tea by mistake.

When I opened my eyes again, I was pinning my fiancé’s stern, old-fashioned, rule-bound elder brother beneath me, his body covered in scandalous red marks.

Our eyes met.

Silence filled the room.

I forced a smile and searched for something—anything—to ease the mortifying tension.

Without a word, he rose, found a length of white silk, and expressionlessly began to—

My eyes nearly popped out of my head.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ll take responsibility!”

“I said I’ll take responsibility!”

When the war ended, the army prostitutes did everything they could to persuade soldiers to take them home, because the alternative was being sold to a brothel.

By the time the dark-skinned, taciturn centurion came looking for me, only an old dying woman and I remained in the camp.

She laughed and asked why I was still waiting for Young General Pei when he was about to marry a princess in a blaze of glory.

That night, Pei Qingfeng pinned me to the bed and ordered me to wait for him at the house he had bought outside the city.

Not once did he ask about the man who had visited me that day.

He seemed certain I would never leave with anyone else.

What he did not know was that I had already accepted the centurion named Zheng Yuan.

On the day Pei Qingfeng married his princess, Zheng Yuan and I would be married too.

When I was fifteen, my royal father chose me from among his many daughters.

I was Xizhou’s brightest pearl, yet he sent me by carriage across the Gobi, the desert, and the grasslands.

I was to travel to the distant Central Plains and marry their Crown Prince.

The Crown Prince had his moonlight and his childhood sweetheart.

But the bright moon must sink, and green plums must ripen.

In the end, only the pearl’s light endures.

My younger sister gave birth to a son in the Eastern Palace.

I brought a fortune in family wealth and cartloads of rare medicinal pills with me to the palace to visit her.

The moment she saw me, she nestled into my arms and began to cry, tears falling one after another.

Her movements were intimate, her voice soft and spoiled. There was not the slightest trace of distance or unfamiliarity between us.

And yet my entire body went rigid, a chill crawling up my spine and sinking into my heart.

Because the face before me, identical to my sister’s in every way,

was not the dead woman’s skin I had sewn onto her with my own hands.

My best friend and I transmigrated together.

She became a princess consort, while I became… a lynx.

“Save me, save me, save me…” I begged.

“Hang in there!” my best friend said. “I’ll fight for custody!”

Then I demonstrated that I could use a toilet all by myself, and Her Majesty the Empress chose me instead.

Later, when my best friend’s husband rebelled and nearly got her killed, it was her turn to beg, “Save me, save me, save me…”

So I-I sprang up and sank my teeth into the villain’s thigh.

Mother often taught me, “A principal wife must have the grace to accept others.”

I was born into a prestigious family as its eldest legitimate daughter. From the day I entered this world, it was destined that even if my future husband was not a prince, nobleman, general, or minister, he would at least be the eldest legitimate son of a family equal to mine in status.

A man destined to inherit his family’s legacy and become the head of his clan was, in all likelihood, never going to be monogamous.

And so, from my earliest childhood until the day I married, I heard the same lesson over and over again: “A principal wife must have the grace to accept others.”

Ten years after my death, the young crown prince had grown up. Clutching my memorial tablet, he announced that he wanted to marry me.

His father beat him to tears with a court memorial.

The august emperor roared, “Wake up! She’s dead!”

You’re the dead one. Your whole family is dead.

I drifted back and forth, then kicked over his most treasured seal.

It landed with a clack, stamping half an impression onto the memorial—right where my name appeared.

Ruiniang.

The crown prince held up the memorial. The tears on his cheeks had not even dried, yet he was laughing and crying all at once. “Ruiniang! Look, Father, it’s Ruiniang! She’s still alive. She’s still alive!”

The emperor was plainly startled, but did his best to look composed. “Nonsense! I simply lost my grip on the seal!”

I kicked it again. The seal that had just settled flat went rolling across the desk and stamped half a crimson impression onto his dragon robe.

Ruiniang.

The emperor panicked and bolted for the door. Halfway there, he remembered something, ran back, and grabbed the crown prince by the nape.

At least he had some paternal feeling. He knew enough to take his son when he fled.

“Guards! There’s a ghost!” he shouted.

The crown prince, meanwhile, was sobbing as he cried into the empty air, “Ruiniang, is that you? You’ve come back, haven’t you?”

Even in tears, he held my memorial tablet tight against his chest.

I looked at him fondly and reached out to wipe his tears, only for my fingers to pass through empty space.

My fingertips felt hollow. My heart ached a little.

Of course. I was a ghost. I could not touch the living; only the things of the dead would answer me.

The first time I met Li Shuyu…

He had black hair, black clothes, and black-rimmed glasses.

He looked ascetic and buttoned-up.

Only after spending some time with him did I realize just how wrong I had been.

This seemingly aloof man would take off his glasses at night,

put in his lip stud and tongue stud, and say thickly,

“Don’t tremble, jiejie.”

When we were kids, I told my childhood friend, “I like your best friend, but don’t tell him.”

Then came his best friend’s wedding.

I grabbed my childhood friend by the throat. “Wow, you really can keep a secret.”

He let out a cold scoff. “Say you like him one more time, and I’ll beat your ass.”

Mother ascended to heaven.

She left me two things: an old yellow dog and a manual for cultivating immortality.

Oh, and one promise.

“Whenever someone beats you, shout your mother’s name three times, and I will come save you.”

I never shouted.

Father had seldom used his fists lately; he had heard that girls in our area had suddenly become valuable, and a wounded one would fetch a poor price.

I was the quietest, shyest girl in the village.

And yet, every night, I went to the ruined temple to seduce the village’s only scholar.

The scholar never took the bait. Disheartened, I decided to steal all the money from home and run away.

He stopped me. “We agreed. When I make something of myself one day, you have to leave on your own.”

I nodded as fast as I could.

Later, he really did pass the imperial examinations with honors, and I finally gained the ability to support myself. So I asked him to sign the divorce papers.

His eyes were bloodshot. “You want to leave me?”

I fell for the beautiful, powerful, tragic second male lead.

For his sake, I shattered my spirit meridians and lost every trace of my cultivation.

Yet when the heroine burst into our wedding hall, he still abandoned me for her.

I called after him, “Xie Qingxing, take one step beyond that door, and I’m done with you.”

He merely held the girl in his arms and showed me the cool, aloof line of his profile.

“She needs me. How can I stand by and do nothing?”

But he had forgotten that Meng Zhiyuan was not the only person who needed him.

My spirit meridians were completely severed, and without pure-yang spiritual energy to sustain them, they would wither within half a month and take my life with them.

But that was all right.

Xie Qingxing was hardly the only cultivator in the world who practiced the Formless Sword.

I transmigrated and became an ancient beast of burden, with signs that I might be headed toward the life of a chicken or duck next.

My major didn’t teach me how to make soap or explosives, and the market’s invisible hand wasn’t about to scoop me up either.

Maybe if I’d transmigrated into the ruling class, I might have wanted to stay in this dynasty.

But I know one thing very clearly: I just want to go home.

I transmigrated into a Merfolk Princess who burst into tears at the drop of a hat.

The System wanted me to bully the brooding villain before his Dragon Transformation.

I swam up to him and, trembling all over, slapped his face with my fishtail.

“B-bas… bastard.”

The System lectured me, “Own it! Put your back into it!”

Later, the villain completed his Dragon Transformation and became the Lord of the Four Seas.

He pinned my fishtail beneath the dragon claw of his lower body, his voice hoarse.

“Not enough. Again.”

After dying a hero, I used the merit I had earned in life to make a wager with the King of Hell.

I would be turned into seven different animals, and if I could get my family to recognize me every time, I would be allowed to return to life.

If I failed, I would stay in the underworld and work there without complaint.

The first animal I became was a giant southern cockroach.

On the day my only daughter was born, the Marchioness of Zhenbei gave birth to a son in the Hall of Mental Cultivation.

At dawn, Shen Chizhou brought me her child and exchanged him for mine.

When I caught him, he merely raised his eyes and said, “The child born of Wan and me must be raised in the palace.”

Song Wan was the great love he had lost in his youth.

Now that she had borne him a child, he meant to make amends to mother and son at any cost.

The cost was my daughter becoming the young lady of the Marquis of Zhenbei’s household.

She went from an exalted imperial princess to the daughter of a mere court official.

After a long silence, I neither wept nor protested.

Instead, I lifted my face and smiled in approval.

“As it should be.”

After all, a child ought to be raised beside her real father.

At my elder sister’s engagement banquet, the man who was meant to become my brother-in-law suddenly turned to propose to me instead.

“Wrong. I wish to marry the Second Miss.”

Everyone was thrown off by this turn of events, not knowing how to react, but once they recovered they forced a smile and congratulated me.

Only my elder sister came to find me late at night. “In a past life, he and I spent over fifty years together. It was only after I married him that I learned there was another woman he loved.”

“For those fifty years, we fought constantly because of that woman, until we grew to despise each other. If you don’t want to marry him, sister can help you reject this match.”

But I declined her kindness and still intended to marry him.

I have no romantic feelings for him. Whether he loved one woman or several was something my elder sister cared about; I did not.